AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C03) Study Plan¶

6-Week Schedule¶

About 8 hours a week. The order follows the domain notes; read each note, then work through the skills list in the exam guide for that domain and be sure you can explain every skill in your own words.

Week 1: Development, part 1 (Domain 1, tasks 1.1 and 1.2)¶

• Coupling, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis, retries and idempotency
• SDKs, credential chain, serialization, API Gateway
• AI-assisted development tools and Bedrock API calls
• Lambda configuration, VPC access, event lifecycle, event source mappings
• Note: 01-development-with-aws-services.md

Week 2: Development, part 2 (Domain 1, task 1.3)¶

• Data store selection, lifecycle, TTL
• Caching patterns
• DynamoDB keys, consistency, Query vs Scan, indexes
• Note: 01-development-with-aws-services.md

Week 3: Security (Domain 2)¶

• IAM policies, roles, STS, Cognito
• Presigned URLs
• KMS envelope encryption, ACM, Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store
• Task 2.3 AI security: access, private connectivity, guardrails, agents, logs
• Note: 02-security.md

Week 4: Testing and deployment (Domain 3)¶

• Packaging, ECR, tagging and lifecycle policies
• SAM build, local invoke, test events, aliases
• ECS and Fargate deployments, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy
• Deployment strategies and rollback
• Note: 03-testing-and-deployment.md

Week 5: Troubleshooting and optimization (Domain 4)¶

• Logs Insights, metrics, X-Ray
• Structured logging, custom metrics, alarms, health checks
• Concurrency, memory tuning, messaging, caching
• Note: 04-troubleshooting-optimization.md

Week 6: Review¶

• Practice questions across all four domains; return to the note for every miss
• Re-read the "What changed from C02" sections in each note and the README
• Check the exam guide's out-of-scope list so you do not over-study